“I’m absolutely a misogynist.”
One’s own bigotry is not often something you hear people admit on their own. If confronted with biases they might have, most people scramble to deny, disprove, and defend themselves. However, there are a few voices which have been anything but shy about their own prejudiced views. The quote above is one of many similarly blatant ones from the one and only Andrew Tate, a British-American kickboxer, podcast host, entrepreneur, and alleged sex offender who has a massive online following for his “male motivation” content.
Most people, by now, have heard of Tate, and maybe even his brother, both of whom gained international infamy when they were arrested in Romania in late 2021 for allegedly running a sex trafficking business. Since about 2020, Tate’s audience has been vast, on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok (before he was banned from all three), and dominated by young men. Tate wants you to think that he embodies masculinity itself — he’s a rich entrepreneur, a world-class fighter, always sitting around with no shirt on surrounded by attractive women and holding a giant cigar. He owns not only his media empire and world-renowned collection of luxury cars, but a thinly-veiled pyramid scheme called “Hustler’s University”, an online course that supposedly teaches young men to be real men, make money, and get women, et cetera. The pearls of wisdom he shares at Hustler’s University and on his podcast appearances have one consistent theme outside of money making: misogyny. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of quotes like the one above, in which Tate compares women (or “females”, as he puts them) to all manner of inanimate objects and instruments with which to advance one’s own masculinity.
His persona is such that most mature adults don’t take him seriously, but the vast majority of his audience is not made up of mature adults — it is made up of adolescent boys, a famously impressionable age demographic who often seem to struggle with insecurities and tend to want masculine “role models” like Tate to look up to. This is where a trend begins to emerge.
According to a poll reported by The Hill, 12th grade boys in America are now two times as likely to identify themselves as “conservative” than they are “liberal.” When this data was being reported on, many people were shocked. There has always been a perception that younger generations are more left-leaning. And they are — while young men are recently becoming more conservative, they are still more liberal than their older counterparts. It’s within their generation that a distinction appears between men and women, and a very large one, at that. According to Scientific American, among 18-24 year-olds who voted in the 2024 election, 67 percent of white men voted for Trump, compared to 43 percent of working-class white women of the same age. Within most generations, the ideological gap between women and men is not so large.
Are these trends evident on a smaller scale, or is it only in national polls that a discrepancy exists between the ideologies of adolescent women and men? Considering the left-leaning nature of Rhode Island and the demographics of our area, a few students had thoughts on the issue.
MJ Bowlin, a junior, said, “I’ve definitely seen my male peers expressing [right-wing] views more since 2024 and the election started.”
Other students, male, female, and gender-queer alike, seemed to agree that they think their male peers are skewing more politically right. Many of them also see this as an issue.
Jessie Brine, a sophomore who goes to the MET school, said, “One major right-wing sentiment I’ve seen in my school is disrespect of pronouns and gender identity. When introducing yourself at our school it is commonplace to say your name and pronouns, and this year there was a new kid [who], when asked his name and pronouns in class he replied, ‘I don’t have pronouns, I don’t mess with any of that gay sh*t.’”
Sentiments like these echo things promoted by conservative social media and political personalities. Thus, many people attribute this ideological trend to conservative role models.
Brine cited that “The big [cause] is the lack of good male role models in these guys’ lives; if they look up to a specific male or father figure with those sorts of beliefs, they often inherit them.”
This “father figure,” for many young men, seems to be Andrew Tate, and it is his rhetoric which America’s adolescent men seem to echo.
Brine also said that “People like Andrew Tate [are] very influential to guys, they…see the money and success and want that for themselves. It helps a lot that these Andrew Tate types prey on the already fragile sense of self most young men have; they will affirm them by putting down other people and explain that they are scientifically and biologically better than women.”
Self-identified ‘redpilled’ young men defend their ideological stances by citing an interest in self-improvement and collective identity. It is true that the communities around influencers like Tate, and even the political following of right-wing figures like President Donald Trump provide a strong sense of identity for young men, particularly those who have goals like fitness and wealth. Their peers, however, seem to observe that these communities are doing more harm than good.
Cece Broccoli, a junior, thinks that “This trend is concerning, [because] most right-wing ideologies promote old-fashioned values that coincide with bigotry.”
At the end of the day, it is up to individual interpretation whether these influences are good, as with any social debate. It’s clear that there are extremists like Andrew Tate among us — ones who identify themselves as misogynists and racists, but with many gender-centric issues at the forefront of politics these days, it has yet to be told electorally truly how influences like Andrew Tate will have impacted the ideologies of young men. Only time will tell.
